Public opinion
versus
popular opinion
ROBERT
O
NISBET
all the heresies
afloat
in
modern democracy, none is greater, more steeped in intellectual
confusion, and potentially more destructive of proper governmental
funetion than that which declares the legitimacy of government to
be directly proportional
to its roots in public opinion-or,
more accurately, in what the daily polls and surveys assure us is public
opinion. It is this heresy that accounts for the constantly augmenting propaganda
that issues forth from all government agencies today-the inevitable effort to shape the very opinion that is being so
assiduously courted-and
for the frequent craven abdication of the
responsibilities of office in the face of some real or imagined expression of opinion by the electorate.
Even worse is the manifest decline in confidence in elected government in the Western democracies,
at all levels, and with this
decline
the erosion
of governmental
authority
in areas where
it is
indispensable:
foreign policy, the military, fiscal stability, and the
preservation of law and order. For, as a moment's thought tells us,
it is impossible for any government-consisting,
after all, of those
supposed to lead-to
command respect and allegiance very long
ff it degrades its representative
function through incessant inquiry
into, and virtual abdication before, what is solemnly declared to be
PUBLIC
OPINION
VERSUS
POPULAR
OPINION
167
"the will of the people." But what is thought or cynically announced
to be the will of the people so often turns out to be no more than
the opinion of special-interest
advocates skilled in the techniques of
contrived populism-a
point I shall return to later.
The important point is that from the time representative
government made its historic appearance in the 18th century, its success
and possibility of survival have been seen by its principal philosophers and statesmen to depend upon a sharp distinction between
representative
government proper and the kind of government that
becomes obedient to eruptions of popular opinion, real or false.
This was of course the subiect of one of Edmund Burke's greatest
documents, his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, in which he declared
that those who govern, once elected, are responsible only to their
own iudgments, not those of the electors. Across the Atlantic an
almost identical position was taken by the authors of The Federalist
and by others arguing for acceptance of the Constitution.
And in
a long tradition down to the present, such minds as John Adams,
John Randolph of Roanoke, Calhoun, Lincoln, Tocqueville,
John
Stuart Mill, Sir Henry Maine, and in our own century in this country, John Dewey, Brandeis, Cardozo, and Walter Lippmann have
argued along the same line.
That a iust government should rest upon the consent of the governed assuredly is as true today as it was when the Declaration of
Independence
was signed. Equally true is the principle that the
people, when properly consulted, remain the most trustworthy
source of that underlying
and continuing wisdom needed when
great choices have to be made-above
all, choices of those representatives
capable of providing leadership
in political matters.
But to move from these truths to the position that is now becoming
so widely accepted, that opinion-of
the kind that can be instantly
ascertained
by any poll or survey-must
somehow govern, must
therefore be incessantly studied, courted, flattered, and drawn upon
in lieu of the iudgment which true leadership alone is qualified to
make in the operating details of government-this
is the great heresy, and also the "fatal malady"
modern democracies.
(as Walter Lippmann
called it) of
It is worse than heresy. It is fatuous. For always present is the
assumption-nowhere
propagated
more assiduously
than by the
media which thrive on it-that
there really /s a genuine public
opinion at any given moment on whatever issue may be ascendant
on the national or the international
scene, and that, beyond this,
we know exactly how to discover
this opinion.
But in truth there
168
THE PUBLIC
INTEREST
isn't, and we don't. What the eminently wise Henry Maine wrote
in Popular Government in 1885 still seems to be true: "Vox Populi
may be Vox Dei, but very little attention shows that there ::ever has
been any agreement as to what Vox means or as to what Populus
means." To these words Maine added: "The devotee of democracy
is in much the same position with the Greeks and their oracles. All
agreed that the voice of an oracle was the voice of a god; but everybody allowed that when he spoke he was not as intelligible as
might be desired."
I do not question the fact that there is in fact public opinion and
that, in the modern age at least, free, democratic government must
be anchored in public opinion. There is, though, as a little reflection
tells us, a substantial and crucial difference between public opinion,
properly so called, and what, following ample precedent,
I shall
call popular opinion. The difference between the two types of opinion is directly related to the differences between the collective
bodies involved. Fundamentally,
this is the difference between organized community on the one hand and the mass or crowd on the
other.
Communities
and transitory majorities
A true public, as A. Lawrence
Lowell stressed in his classic work
on public opinion more than a half-century
ago, is at bottom a
community: built, like all forms of community, around certain ends
held in common and also around acceptance
of the means proper
to achievement
of these ends. Not the people in their numerical
total, not a majority, nor any minority as such represents
public
opinion if the individuals involved do not form some kind of community,
by virtue of possessing
common
ends, purposes,
and rules
of procedure. Public opinion is given its character by genuine consensus, by unifying tradition, and by what Edmund Burke called
"constitutional spirit."
Popular opinion is by contrast shallow of root, a creature of the
mere aggregate or crowd, rooted in fashion or fad and subject to
caprice and whim, easily if tenuously formed around a single issue
or personage, and lacking the kind of cement that time, tradition,
and convention alone can provide. Popular opinion is an emanation
of what is scarcely more than the crowd or mass, of a sandheap
given quick and passing shape by whatever winds may be blowing
through the marketplace
at any given time. It would be incorrect
to say that popular and public opinion are totally unconnected.
PUBLIC
OPINION
What
proves
VERSUS
POPULAR
to be public
OPINION
opinion
in a community
169
is commonly
generated by popular opinion, whether in majority or minority form;
but it is only through a process of adaptation or assimilation-by
the
habits, values, conventions, and codes which form the fabric of the
political community-that
popular opinion ever becomes what we
are entitled to call public opinion, the opinion that is in fact more
than opinion, that is at bottom a very reflection of national character.
The distinction I am making may seem abstract to some, but it is
a very real distinction and it has been so regarded by a long line
of observers and students of government beginning in this country
with the Founding Fathers, most profoundly with the authors of
The Federalist. Few things seem to have mattered more to the
architects of the American political community than that government should rest upon public opinion, upon public consent and
affirmation. But in reading the key writings of that age, we are struck
repeatedly by the seriousness of the thought that was given to the
true nature of the public and the means proper to the eliciting from
this public the will that would be most faithful to the actual character of the public, the character manifest in the people conceived
as community-or
rather as a community of smaller communitiesrather than as mere mass or multitude brought into precarious and
short-lived existence by some galvanizing issue or personality.
Hence the strong emphasis in the Constitution and in The Federalist upon the whole set of means whereby government, without
being in any way severed from the will of the people, would respond
to this will only as it had become refined through subjection to
constitutional processes. Behind the pervasive emphasis in the Constitution upon principles of check and balance, division of power,
and intermediate
levels of government and administration
ascending from local community through the states to the national government-principles
which so many of the philosophes and then the
Jacobins were to find unacceptable,
even repugnant,
in France
when the Revolution burst there-lay
a deep distrust of the human
mind, of human nature, when it had become wrenched from the
social contexts which alone can provide discipline and stability,
which alone can put chains upon human appetites and make possible a liberty that does not degenerate into license.
There was, in short, no want of respect among the Founding
Fathers for the wisdom of the people as the sole basis of legitimate,
constitutional
government. Neither, however, was there any want
of recognition of the ease with which any community or society
can become dissolved into, in Burke's words, "an unsocial, uncivil,
170
THE
unconnected
chaos," with destructive
passion
PUBLIC
dominant
INTEREST
where
re-
straint and principle ordinarily prevail. There were few ff any
illusions present in the minds of those responsible for the American
Constitution concerning any native and incorruptible
goodness of
human nature or any instinctual enlightenment
of the people considered abstractly. Steeped in the works of Thucydides,
Aristotle,
Cicero, and other classics of ancient civilization and profoundly
respectful of the principles of society and government they were
able to find in the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, and Burke, the
Founding Fathers, and most particularly
the authors of The Federalist, were well aware of the immense difference between the people conceived
in terms
of the social and moral attachments
which
precede political organization-which
indeed must underlie it ff
either anarchy or despotism is to be avoided-and
the people conceived in the romantic, metaphysical
fashion of a Rousseau, for
whom all such attachments were but so many chains upon human
freedom.
From The Federalist through the works of such profound interpreters of the American political scene as Tocqueville, Bryce, and
Lowell, down to the writings in our own time of such perceptive
students of the political process as Lindsay Rogers and Walter Lippmann, there is a vivid and continuing awareness of the importance
of the difference I have just described: the difference between public and mere aggregate, between the people as organized by convention and tradition into a community and the people as but a
multitude, and between public opinion properly termed and opinion that is at best but a reflection of transitory majorities. It is this
awareness, forming one of the most luminous intellectual traditions
in American political thought, that I shall be concerned with in
what follows.
Federalist trust and distrust
The Federalist, for the most part originally written in the form of
individual letters to New York newspapers in 1787-88 by Hamilton,
Madison, and Jay, is by common assent the single work in American
political philosophy that can take its place among the very greatest
classics in the West since the Greeks. The unity and cogency of
the work as a whole are astonishing, given the nature of its composition; so are the comprehensiveness
of scope, the social and psychological insights united with political vision, and the sheer eloquence.
Primarily
concerned
with
constitutional
structure
and
PUBLIC
OPENION
VERSUS
POPULAR
OPINION
171
process, The Federalist is, among other things, a profound study of
the relation of public opinion to republican government.
There is, I think, no better single insight into the Federalist view
of the role of public opinion in government than that afforded by
Number 49 of the papers. Here Madison addresses himself respectfully but negatively to the proposal, made by Jefferson, that "whenever any two of the three branches of government shall concur in
opinion, each by the voices of two thirds of their whole number, that
a convention is necessary for altering the constitution, or correcting
breaches of it, a convention shall be called for the purpose."
Madison allows that there is great force in Jefferson's reasoning
and that "a constitutional road to the decision of the people ought
to be marked out and kept open, for certain great and extraordinary
occasions." There are nevertheless, Madison writes, "insuperable objections" to Jefferson's proposal, and it is in the careful, restrained,
but none the less powerful outlining of these that we acquire our
clearest sense of the Federalist position concerning popular or publie opinion.
In the first place, Madison writes, "every appeal to the people
would carry an implication of some defect in the government" and
"frequent appeals would deprive the government of that veneration
which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the
wisest and freest governments
would not possess the requisite
stability." What follows these words is central to Madison's argument and indeed to his entire political theory:
If it be true that all governments rest on opinion, it is no less true
that the strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like
man himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires firmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is associated .... In a nation of philosophers, this consideration ought to be
disregarded. A reverence for the laws would be sufficiently inculcated
by the voice of an enlightened reason. But a nation of philosophers
is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished
for by Plato.
There are two other objections Madison makes to Jefferson's proposal, both anchored in the same caution regarding the uses of public opinion. First is the serious danger of "disturbing
the public
tranquillity
by interesting too strongly the public passions." Admittedly, we have had great success in the "revisions of our constitutions," all of which does "much honor to the virtue and intelligence" of the people. But it has to be remembered,
Madison
writes,
172
THE
PUBLIC
INTEREST
that such constitution-making
was at a time when manifest danger
from the outside "repressed the passions most unfriendly to order
and concord." Beyond this, he notes, there was the extraordinary
confidence the people then had in their political leaders. We cannot,
however, count on the future in this light: "The future situations in
which we must expect to be usually placed, do not present any
equivalent security against the danger which is apprehended."
But the greatest danger Madison foresees in any elevation of the
popular will through frequent recourse to it on matters best left
to the government is the unhealthy increase in legislative power,
at the expense of executive and iudiciary, that would inevitably
follow habitual references to the people of matters of state. The
legislators, Madison observes, have, by virtue of their number and
their distribution in the country, as well as their "connections of
blood, of friendship, and of acquaintance,"
a natural strength that
neither the executive nor the iudiciary can match: "We have seen
that the tendency of republican governments
is to an aggrandizement of the legislative at the expense of other departments.
The
appeals to the people, therefore, would usually be made by the executive and iudiciary departments.
But whether made by one side
or the other, would each side enioy equal advantages on the trial?"
Madison's answer is of course that they would not, that the legislators would, for the reasons just noted, tend always to outweigh
the other two departments.
But, he continues, even if on occasion
this proved not to be the case-if, for example, the "executive power might be in the hands of a peculiar favorite of the people"-the
upshot of any soliciting of popular opinion would undoubtedly
be
baneful. For, irrespective of where power might lie in the result,
the matter would eventually turn upon not rational consideration
but emotions and passions. "The passions, therefore, not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment."
How deeply Madison felt about this is attested by his repeating
these arguments in The Federalist Number 50, where the subiect is
"periodical appeals to the people" rather than "occasional appeals,"
as in the preceding paper. Not even the institutionalization
of such
appeal, he thinks, would save the process from the kinds of consequences he has iust described. Everything in the history of republican government suggests to Madison the ease with which issues
become stripped of their rational substance and made into matters
where prestige of opinion-leaders,
factionalism among parties, and,
not least, passion take command. He adduces the example of the
Council of Censors which met in Pennsylvania
in 1783 and 1784
PUBLICOPINION
VER£U$POPULAR
OPINION
173
to inquire into "whether the constitution had been violated." The
results, Madison writes, were all that might have been expected:
"Every unbiased observer may infer, without danger of mistake,
and at the same time without meaning to reflect on either party,
or any individuals of either party, that, unfortunately,
reason, must have presided over their decisions."
Diversity and representative
passion, not
government
What shines through not merely Madison's thought but that of
The Federalist generally is no simple, meretricious disdain for the
people and its residual wisdom, no arrogation to some elite or natural aristocracy of the intelligence
necessary to conduct government, but, instead, a solid conviction that context is vital in all situations where opinion and judgment are required. There are, as
Madison and also Hamilton make plain, contexts in which reason
and common sense will tend to come to the surface, but there are
also contexts
in which
sheer emotions
or, as Madison
has it, pas-
sions dominate at the expense of rational thought. Everything possible, therefore, must be done to confine deliberations
on government to the former contexts and to rely upon the vital principle
of division of governmental power, of checks and balances, to maintain stability and freedom alike-hence
the Federalist apprehensions concerning too easy, too frequent, and too regular submission of issues to the people.
It is impossible to catch the flavor of the political theory in The
Federalist, and particularly
its conception
of the proper role of
public opinion in government,
without clearly understanding
the
view of human nature that was taken by Hamilton and his fellow
authors. Here is no Rousseauan-romantic
view of man born free
and good, corrupted by institutions. On the contrary, what The Federalist offers us is a design of government for human beings who
on occasion may be good, but who on occasion may also be evil,
and for whom liberation from such institutions as family, local community, church, and government could only result in anarchy that
must shortly lead to complete despotism. The essence of The Federalist, a notable scholar, Benjamin F. Wright, has written, "is that
a government must be so constructed
as to stand the strains that
are inevitable. A government designed only for favorable circumstances would deserve to be rejected." And strains will exist, are
bound to exist, so long as man remains what he is, invariably a
compound
of the good and the bad. One would look in vain for a
174
THE
PUBLIC
INTEREST
Spirit of pessimism or misanthropy
in The Federalist. Its authors
do not hate vices; they only recognize them. Edmund Burke, in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France, would write of the French
Revolutionists:
"By hating vices too much, they come to love men
too little." That can scarcely be said of the authors of The Federalist. The aim of government, free government, is simply that of
providing institutions so strong, and also in such an equilibrial relationship, that neither calculated evil nor misspent goodness flowixag from human nature could easily weaken or destroy them.
Where Rousseau, like so many of his impassioned fellow intellectuals in the salons of Paris, saw extermination
of "factions" as
the obiective of government-and
ble, of all the smaller patriotisms
the extermination
too, ff possiin the social order in the inter-
est of political legitimacy-The
Federalist recognizes the inevitability of such factions and associations, with Madison declaring that
"'the latent causes of faction are..,
sown into the nature of man;
and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances
of civil society."
There is to be expected a "landed interest," a "manufacturing
interest," a "moneyed interest," and the like. Creditors and debtors,
with their inevitably divergent interests, will always be with us.
What Madison writes is: "The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modem legislation,
and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and
ordinary operations of the government."
It is this recognition of the intrinsic and ineradicable
diversity
of the social and economic orders, of the pluralism of society, that
leads the authors of The Federalist to their striking emphasis on
representative
institutions. Direct democracy
is as foreign to the
spirit of The Federalist as it is to the Constitution.
In this, as in
other respects, the philosophy of The Federalist's recommendations
is utterly foreign to that philosophy
of government
inscribed in
Rousseau's political writings and in the writings of most of the philosophes, which lay behind the greater part of the legislation of
the French Revolution. For the French radicals (and the same is
also true
of Bentham
and
the English
radicals),
representation
was repugnant. Representative
rectly) described by Rousseau, and castigated
dal" in origin. It was, happily, Montesquieu,
erence for "mixed" government, intermediate
and representative
bodies, who proved to be
upon the Americans.
any thought
of
institutions were (coraccordingly, as "feuwith his virtual revlayers of authority,
the greater influence
PUBLIC OPINION VERSUS POPULAR OPINION
The intermediation
175
of political authority
Montesquieu lies behind Madison's praise of political institutions
as protecting society against the "diseases most incident to republican government," and behind what Madison calls "the delegation
of government" to the small number of citizens elected by the rest.
For pure democracy Madison has nothing but distrust: "From this
view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure demoeraey,
by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens,
who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the misehiefs of faction." Such democracies "have
ever been spectacles
of turbulence
and contention;
have ever been
found incompatible
with personaI security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have
been violent in their deaths."
It is the intermediation
of political authority, a principle that
was the heart of medieval jurisprudence,
as von Gierke and Maitland have told us, and that Montesquieu
revived in his classic of
1748, that the authors of The Federalist see as vital to the proper
relation of government and public opinion. Through the several,
ascending layers of government, local, regional, and national, it is
possible "to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them
through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom
may best discern the true interest of their country."
Accompanying Federalist distrust of pure democracy, and of majorities as such, is a distrust of equalitarianism.
Human beings are
no more equal in their opinions on governmental
matters than
they are in their strengths and talents: This is the evident view
of the authors, particularly of Hamilton and Madison. In Number
10, written by Madison, we find explicit statement of this: "Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government
[i.e., equalitarian
democracy], have erroneously supposed that by
reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they
would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in
their possessions, their opinions, and their passions."
Such an argument does not repudiate the Declaration
pendence. Not even Jefferson, in whom affection was
of Indeprobably
greatest for the doctrine of natural rights, thought that any rigid
deduction could be made from the phrase, "all men are created
equal." Certainly Jefferson's notable plan for public education in
Virginia reveals no hint of a dogmatic equalitarianism.
That human beings are equal, in moral worth at least, and that they deserve equality before the law-this was no more objectionable to a
176
THE PUBLIC
Hamilton
or a Madison
than to a Jefferson• The respect
INTEREST
in which
Jefferson is held throughout The Federalist suggests that Madison
and his fellow authors never thought that their rejection of equality as social and economic dogma repudiated the spirit of the Declaration or the ideas of Jefferson-though
it would be absurd to
pretend that differences did not exist between Jefferson and the
authors of The Federalist.
There is striking similarity between the fundamental
ideas of
The Federalist and those of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution
in France, the latter published shortly after the Federalist letters
had made their appearance
in America• When Burke wrote that
"those who attempt
• . .
but
son
that
to level, never equalize"
and that "the levellers
only change and pervert the natural order of things," he was
echoing the sentiments contained in the passage from Madiquoted above• But it is not only concerning equalitarianism
there is substantial
agreement:
There is common distrust
of what Burke called "governmental
simplicity," common recognition of the intricate nature of man and the complexity of society,
common respect for public opinion but only when duly mediated
by time and institution, common veneration for representative
institutions and division of authority, and common apprehension concerning mere numerical majorities, so prone, as both Madison and
Burke knew, to the rise of despotism•
Tocqueviile
and the tyranny of the majority
Similarly, there is affinity between The Federalist and Tocqueville's Democracy
in America, especially the first part, which is
concerned with political institutions. We know that Tocqueville admired The Federalist, particularly
Madison's contributions. He read
the book while on his nine-month
visit to this country and later
with studious concentration
after he had returned to Paris, and
most of his interviews in this country seem to have been with Americans of definitely Federalist persuasion. Tocqueville's book is in a
great many respects the child of a union effected between his
French-derived
interest in the democratic revolution of the early
19th century and his American-derived
respect for the kind of political structures
and processes which The Federalist had advocated in its defense of the American Constitution• For Tocqueville,
as for Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, the principles of decentralization of administration,
of political pluralism, regionalism, and localism, and of division of power and institutional
checks upon and
PUBLIC OPINION VERSUS POPULAR OPINION
177
balances of power are fundamental to and constituent of free republican government.
So is there fundamental
likeness between
The Federalist and
Democracy
in America
on the role of public
opinion
and on the
dangers which lie in direct, popular govemment
unmediated by the
representative,
deliberative
bodies prescribed by the Constitution.
Nearly a half-century
separates the America of The Federalist
papers from the America Tocqueville and his friend Beaumont visited in 1831. Great changes had taken place. What had been prospect for the Founding Fathers was by now reality, and as Toequeville's Notebooks make clear, there was not the slightest doubt
among the Americans he talked with that America's future was a
secure one. It would be hard to exaggerate the buoyancy of mind,
the confidence, even at times the complacency, above all the spirit
of manifest progress that existed in the Age of Jackson, so far as
Tocqueville's observations
are concerned. And yet, hovering over
all of Tocqueville's
impressions and reflections on the American
scene, is his concern with, his apprehensions
about, the power
exerted by the majority in American society, the fetters which he
thought were placed upon genuine individuality by public or majority opinion. 1
Nowhere, he writes, does public opinion rule as in the United
States. There is a revealing entry, under date of October 25, 1831,
in the Notebooks: "'The people is always right," that is the dogma
of the republic, just as 'the king can do no wrong' is the religion
of monarchic states. It is a great question to decide whether the
one is more important than the other; but what is sure is that neither the one nor the other is true."
As Bryce was to point out, correctly I believe, Toequeville exaggerated the degree of dominance by the majority in the United
States that he visited, and he did not in any event ever distinguish
between what he called "public opinion" and the ascendancy
of
the majority on a given matter. Beyond this, as political events and
personages, and also literary and artistic productions
within a decade or two after Tocqueville's
visit, were to make incontestably
clear,
there
was evidently
not nearly
the suffocating
effect upon
1It will always be a matter of debate
among Tocqueville
scholars
as to the
exact proportions
of the influence exerted on his mind by preoccupation
with
France, especially
with the circumstances
under which Louis Philippe had been
elevated
to the throne in 1830, and the influence
exerted by actual experience
in the United States during his short visit. As many a reviewer
noted at the
time, so often when Toequeville
writes "America,"
his eye seems to be actually
on France. Nevertheless,
the book, especially
the first part, is about American
society, and I shall treat it here in that light.
178
THE
PUBLIC
INTEREST
individuality
in America that Toequeville
ascribes repeatedly
to
the maiority, and (in the second part of his book) to equality. Nevertheless, Tocqueville's views on the maiority are as important to
us in our day as those on equality:
When an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to
whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion
constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed
by the maiority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public
force consists of the majority under arms ....
However iniquitous or
absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as
well as you can.
So impressed by and apprehensive
of the majority is Tocqueville
that he even compares its power to that of the Spanish Inquisition,
noting that whereas the Inquisition had never been able to prevent large numbers of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain,
"the empire of the maiority succeeds much better in the United
States, since it actually removes any wish to publish them." In the
United States no one is actually punished for reading this kind of
book, "but no one is induced to write them; not because all the
citizens are immaculate in conduct, but because the maiority of
the community
is decent
and orderly."
Individuality and American society
It is in this context
that Tocqueville
utters
one of his most fre-
quently quoted observations: "I know of no country in which there
is so little independence
of mind and real freedom of discussion
as in America." So great, he thought, was the influence of the maiority's opinion upon the individual mind that the number of genuinely great or creative human beings was bound to diminish in
the ages ahead. The first great generation of political leaders in the
United States had, after all, been a product of different, even aristocratic, contexts. Moreover, "public opinion then served, not to
tyrannize over, but to direct the exertions of individuals." Very different, Tocqueville thinks, are present circumstances.
"In that immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the United
States, I found very few men who displayed that manly candor
and masculine independence
of opinion which frequently
distinguished the Americans of former times, and which constitutes the
leading feature in distinguished
characters wherever they may be
found."
PUBLICOPINIONVERgU_POPULAR
OPINION
The effect of the majority
is not merely
1"/9
to tyrannize
the indi-
vidual but also to diminish him. In the presence of the majority,
Tocqueville observes, the individual "is overwhelmed by the feeling of his own insignificance and impotence." From the Notebooks
it is evident that Tocqueville was genuinely distressed by his own
observations, and by what was reported to him, of instances in
which individual dissent, or, for that matter, even individual act,
even
jority
man
there
though protected thoroughly by law, could be stifled by maopinion. He refers to "the fury of the public" directed at a
in Baltimore who happened to oppose the War of 1812, and
is a long account of an interview with a white American
(the gist of which went into a footnote in Democracy in America)
on the failure of black freedmen in a Northern city to vote in a given
election-the
upshot of which, Tocqueville
concludes, is that although the laws permit, majority opinion deprives. The majority
thus claims the right of making the laws and of breaking them as
well: "If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that
event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority, which
may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation
and
oblige them to have recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then
be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism."
Immediately
after this passage comes a long, fully appreciative,
and respectful quotation from Madison's Number 51 of The Federal/st, in which the argument is that while it is of great importance
to guard a society against the oppression of its rulers, it is equally
important to "guard one part of the society against the injustice
the other part."
of
And yet, with all emphasis upon Tocqueville's
apprehensions
concerning individuality
and freedom in American society as the
result of majority opinion, we are also obliged to emphasize the
sections of his work which deal with "the causes which mitigate
the tyranny of the majority in the United States." He cites the
absence of centralized administration,
the presence of the frontier
which made it possible for individuals to escape the conformities
pressed upon them, the still-vigorous regionalism and localism of
American society, the checks which executive and judiciary exert
upon the majority-dominated
Congress, the ascendancy
of the legal profession, 2 the institution of trial by jury, and, in many ways
-_"... Some of the tastes and the habits of the aristocracy may be... discovered in the characters of lawyers" and "in all free governments, of whatever
form they may be, members of the legal profession will be found in the front
ranks of all parties. The same remark is also applicable to the aristocracy."
180
THE PUBLIC
INTEREST
most important for Tocqueville, the unlimited freedom of association. The latter, both in its political form of party and its civil form
of interest-group,
can be counted upon, Tocqueville thinks, so long
as the principle remains vital, to protect individuals from the majority and the kind of government majorities seek to create.
Tocqueville was not, in sum, wholly pessimistic about the United
States. He refers to it in the final pages of the first volume as the
freest and most prosperous
people
on earth, destined
to achieve
a
commercial and military supremacy in the distant future that will
be rivaled, he writes, only by Russia. How deeply this admiration
for American political institutions lay in Tocqueville's mind is evidenced by the fact that in 1848-a tormenting
year for him in
French politics-when
he wrote a new preface to the 12th edition
of Democracy
in America, he repeated
and even added to the
laudatory remarks earlier written in the final sections of the first
volume. If Tocqueville himself was little read after about 1880 (the
present Tocqueville revival did not begin until the late 1930's), the
reason is in some part that the greatness he himself had been among
the first to see in American political institutions was the subject
of so many works written by Americans themselves that Tocqueville's own book tended to become lost, to seem dated, even inadequate.
Bryce and the dominance of the majority
There was another classic on American government that made
its appearance
in 1888, at the very height of American belief in
American greatness. It is doubtful that Lord Bryce's The American Commonwealth
will ever undergo the revival Tocqueville has
known in our own age, but this is in considerable
degree the consequence of the very virtues of Bryce's study. It is fair to say, taking
both writers in their roles as analysts of the American political
scene, that so far as our own attention to Bryce is concerned, he
suffers from his virtues, just as Tocqueville prospers from his defects. Bryce's command of the details of American government and
its surrounding
society is far superior to Tocqueville's,
but it is
this very command that today makes him seem dated. Tocqueville's defects of observation are only too well known, but they
are offset by abstract reflections, often at the level of genius, on
democracy sub specie aeternitatis. Fewer such reflections are to be
found in Bryce, and Woodrow Wilson, then still a professor, was
right in declaring
them inferior to Tocqueville's.
All the same, there
PUBLIC
OPINION
VERSUS
POPULAR
OPINION
181
is a significant amount of political theory or philosophy in Bryce,
not least on the subject of public opinion.
Bryce's America is of course a vastly different one from that
Tocqueville and Beaumont had travelled through 60 years before.
The Civil War, the eruption of corporate capitalism, the unbroken
expansion to the Pacific, the mushrooming of towns and cities, the
development of the two large political parties and their machines,
the whole public education movement, the establishment of colleges
and universities everywhere in the country, the explosion of newspapers (some of great power), the spirit of nationalism, and, not
least, the rise of America as a recognized world power-all
of this
made any treatment of American democracy in the 1880's necessarily different from anything possible in the Age of Jackson.
There are nevertheless interesting continuities to be seen in Bryce
which reach back through Tocqueville to Hamilton and the other
authors of The Federalist, a work that Bryce clearly admires as
greatly as Tocqueville
did. For Hamilton, Bryce reserved words
of sheer eulogy, giving him status along with Burke, Fox, Pitt, Stein,
yon Humboldt, Napoleon, and Talleyrand as one among the greatest group of statesmen any single period of Western history has
ever come up with. But his appreciation
of the other authors of
The Federalist is scarcely less, and the same holds for the principles which brought that volume into being.
What Bryce adds to The Federalist and to Tocqueville on the
subject of public opinion is, first, a degree of systematic analysis
in strictly scholarly style that public opinion as a concept had not
had before, and second, a number of distinctions which we would
not expect to find in the earlier works and which, so far as I can
see, laid the essential ground on which all subsequent
studies of
American public opinion have been made. The section, 12 chapters in length, that Bryce gives us would have been worthy even
then of separate publication, and I frankly don't think we have
reached the point even yet in our knowledge of the subject that
would make the reading of Bryce superfluous.
"In no country is public opinion so powerful as in the United
States; in no country can it be so well studied." These opening
words are followed by an inquiry into the nature of public opinion, its relation to government in earlier times and other countries,
and then by a series of chapters on opinion, majority, processes of
diffusion, and controlling influences upon opinion as these are to
be found in the United States. In words which distinctly resemble
those Walter
Lippmann
wrote a generation
later on "stereotypes,"
lS2
xuE PUBHC_NT_REST
Bryce tells us: "Everyone is of course predisposed to see things in
some one particular light by his previous education, habits of mind,
accepted dogmas, religious or social affinities, notions of his own
personal interest. No event, no speech or article, ever falls upon a
perfectly virgin soil: The reader or listener is always more or less
biased already." Orthodox political theory, Bryce observes, assumes
that every citizen has or ought to have "thought out for himself certain opinions ....
But one need only try the experiment of talking
to that representative
of public opinion whom the Americans call
the 'man in the cars' to realize
classes of the people."
how uniform
opinion
is among
all
Yet Bryce, unlike Tocqueville,
finds no tyranny of a maiority.
We may, he suggests, look for evidences of this tyranny in three
places: Congress, the statutes of the states, and in the sentiments
and actions of public opinion outside the law. But in none, he concludes, is there in fact manifestation
of the dominance of the majority. Too many checks exist upon this maiority in all three spheres.
Bryce is skeptical indeed that such maiority tyranny existed in
America even in Tocqueville's day, noting dryly the great efflorescence of individuality in so many sectors of American life shortly
after Tocqueville's visit.
But, Bryce continues, even if we assume that such majority tyranny did in fact exist in Tocqueville's America, a great many things
have happened to check or disperse it. When Tocqueville visited
the United States, the nation "was in the heyday of its youthful
strength, flushed with self-confidence, intoxicated with the exuberance of its own freedom ....
The anarchic teachings of Jefferson
had borne fruit. Administration
and legislation, hitherto left to the
educated classes, had been seized by the rude hands of men of
low social position and scanty knowledge."
Very different, Bryce writes, is the America of the 1880's. The
dark and agonizing issue of slavery has been removed through the
Civil War-an
event, Bryce believes, that purged the American
nation of many issues on which ruthless majorities were willing to
ride roughshod over the rights of individuals and minorities during
the years leading up to the war: "The years which have passed
since the war have been years of immensely extended and popularized culture and enlightenment.
Bigotry in religion and everything else has broken down." He continues: "If social persecution
exists in the America of today, it is only in a few dark corners. One
may travel all over the North and the West, mingling with all classes
• . . without hearing of it."
PUBLIC
OPINION
VERSUS
POPULAR
OPINION
183
In no respect, Bryce observes, is there to be found in America
the kinds of violence or repression against unpopular opinions which
one still finds in Ireland, France, and Great Britain. On balance,
Bryce believes in the first place that Tocqueville had misperceived
the nature of majority, and had greatly underestimated
the authentic willingness of minorities to submerge themselves and their
views in a national consensus, and in the second place that a signal
change had taken place in America and, with this, in the whole
structure of public opinion.
The "fatalism of the multitude"
In one respect, however, Bryce can be seen as almost a pure reflection of Toequeville, and that is in his notable chapter on "the
fatalism of the multitude." It is this fatalism-one
found, Bryce
argues, in all large populations characterized by "eomplete political and social equality"-that
Tocqueville and others have confused
with "tyranny of the majority." As the result of sueh fatalism (we
would today describe it in the language of mass conformity),
individuals and groups are led to acquiesce in numbers, to abandon
personal and sectarian beliefs for the sheer relief of participating
in the special kind of community and of power that great, undifferentiated
masses represent: "This tendence to acquiescence
and
submission, this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this
belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose
movement may be studied but cannot be turned,
to call the Fatalism of the Multitude."
I have ventured
Anyone who knows Tocqueville
will recognize instantly that
Bryce's "Fatalism of the Multitude" is indeed different from what
Tocqueville had called "tyranny of the majority" in the first part
of Democracy in America. But it is not different from, it is almost
pure reflection of, the social mass-undifferentiated,
monotonous,
enveloping, and uniform-that
Tocqueville describes in such detail
in the second part of his work, the part that is devoted to equality
rather than the majority. If it had been the majority in the first
part that had, for Tocqueville,
extinguished
individuality,
it is
equality in the second. And in this he and Bryce are in close accord.
But like Tocqueville, Bryce finds in America a large number of
forces-among
others, localism, regionalism, voluntary association,
faith in institutions and also in the future of the country, and persisting freedom of discussion, all factors that Tocqueville had cited
-which moderate this fatalism of the multitude, this inclination of
184
THE
mass populations
of individuality.
to favor uniformity
PUBLIC
and the resultant
INTEREST
sterilization
These are the forces too which, in Bryce's judgment, give some
degree of security to bona fide public opinion and its necessarily
slow and deliberate
spread through
American society-security
against the effects of suddenly formed movements
and crusades.
Bryce was deeply impressed by the still regnant localism and regionalism of opinion in the America of his day-the
existence of,
say, a profound antipathy in California toward Orientals that most
of the rest of the country could only regard as bizarre, to say the
least. But he was also struck by the long-run tendency of localisms
and regionalisms of opinion to become fused, the elements in common to become the real stuff of American public opinion, which he
did not doubt could become powerful:
So tremendous a force would be dangerous if it moved rashly. Acting
over and gathered from an enormous area, in which there exist many
local differences, it needs time, often a long time, to become conscious
of the preponderance of one set of tendencies over another. The elements of both local difference and of class difference must (so to
speak) be well shaken up together and each part brought into contact with the rest, before the mixed liquid can produce a precipitate
in the form of a practical conclusion.
Lowell and the political community
It was left to A. Lawrence Lowell, writing 20 years later at Harvard, to develop a crucial point that neither Tocqueville nor Bryce
had given emphasis or focus to: the necessity of a genuine political
community, and with this of a clearly perceived public interest, as
the context of public opinion worthy of the name. Lowell's Public
Opinion and Popular Government, published in 1913, is somewhat
neglected these days-which
is a pity, for its essential themes remain
highly pertinent. The book is, so far as I am aware, the first systematic treatise on public opinion, the first to lift the subiect from
the ancillary if important position it has in the works of Tocqueville, Bryce, and A. V. Dicey's slightly earlier work on law and opinion in 19th-century England, and to give it a virtually prior role
in the study of the governmental process. Written more or less as a
textbook, Lowell's work is actually a scholarly, ground-breaking
inquiry fully the equal in intellectual substance of his more famous,
earlier study of English political institutions.
It is this work that
makes explicit the distinction I have used in this essay between
public and popular, or merely majority, opinion.
PUBLIC
OPINION
VERSUS
It is not strange,
POPULAR
OPINION
185
taking the historical
context into consideration,
that Lowell should have made the political community a paramount
consideration, for the America of his day had become increasingly
torn by economic, class, regional, and ethnic interests which were
being translated into political expression. Many of the voices generated by the passage of America from a predominantly
agricultural
to an industrial society, and by an economic system that could seem
to a great many participants and observers to be in the hands of the
great trusts and monopolies, were by Lowell's time becoming clamant. Populism, Progressivism, an increasingly active labor movement, socialism-at
least in tractarian form, and here and there in
organizational
shape-and
an increasingly
reform-oriented
Demo-
cratic Party were among the realities of Lowell's day. Woodrow
Wilson, after all, had been elected on a platform of "The New
Freedom" the year before Lowell's book appeared. That period of
Good Feeling which Bryce had been so struck by in the period from
the 1870's to the 1890's seemed suddenly to be ending, its place
taken by one in which strife between parties, classes, and sections
of the country over such matters as control of wealth and property,
tariffs, workmen's wage and hour and safety laws, direct tax on
income, and a host of others, could appear almost endemic. This
was also the period in which a variety of proposals
for direct, pop-
ular democracy were becoming law in many parts of the United
States: the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, among other
such innovations.
It is impossible
to miss in Lowell's
book, its scholarship
and ob-
iectivity notwithstanding,
an undercurrent
of deep concern that
public opinion, rooted in the people as genuine national community,
generated by deeply held convictions and sentiments, and forming
the necessary substratum of any free, representative
government,
would become confused with and blurred by mere popular opinion,
the kind of so-called collective opinion that can be had from any
person on any subject, however complex or remote, merely by the
asking. The following passage from Lowell might well have been
written by one of the authors of The Federalist:
A body of men are politically capable of public opinion only so far
as they are agreed upon the ends and aims of government and upon
the principles by which those ends shall be attained. They must be
united, also, about the means whereby the action of the government
is to be determined, in a conviction, for example, that the views of
a majority---or it may be some other portion of their numbers--ought
to prevail; and a political community as a whole is capable of public
opinion only when this is true of the great bulk of the citizens.
186
THE PUBLIC
Communities
Lowell
INTEREST
and legitimate majorities
is the first to define specifically
the public,
properly
so
called, as a community, one consisting-as
does any form of community-of
common values, ends, and acceptance of means, and endowed with the capacity to create a sense of membership
and to
generate belief in the reality of common or public interest. Such
opinion is rooted, Lowell stresses, not simply in political motivations alone but in the lives of individuals as revealed in the full
gamut of social, economic, and moral existence. Whatever may be
the origin of a given expression of public opinion-in
the ideology
of a minority, a single party or even sect, or in even the presence of
a signal personage-its
reality and ultimate power as public opinion
take shape only through assimilative processes whereby belief or
conviction becomes bred into family, neighborhood,
religion, job,
and the other contexts of individual life and thought. At any given
moment there may be dozens, hundreds, of popular impressions or
sentiments, all capable of being voiced by one or another interest
or ideology. But few of these ever become transposed
into the
substance of genuine public opinion. For that, time and also historical circumstance
are required.
Lowell is particularly
concerned
with stressing the difference
between a public and a mere majority. "When two highwaymen
meet a belated traveller on a dark road and propose to relieve him
of his watch and wallet, it would clearly be an abuse of terms to
say that in the assemblage on that lonely spot there was a public
opinion in favor of a redistribution
of property." Lowell's example
is a homely one, but it is given enlarged and pertinent significance
just afterward in some words aimed at the political state: "May
this not be equally true under organized government, among people
that are for certain purposes a community?" In sum, a majority of
voters is easily imaginable in support of redistribution
in society or of any of a large number of proposals
of property
affecting the
very social and economic base of human life. It does not follow,
however, from Lowell's point of view, that such a majority necessarily reflects public opinion. For him public opinion is limited, as
it was indeed for The Federalist, to expressions of views relating
to a community and to the purposes for which the community
is founded. There are legitimate and illegitimate majorities so far
as the state is concerned. And a great deal that passes for "public
opinion" in the judgments of interested individuals may be, and
often is, no more than "popular opinion," something, as we have
seen, inherently
more superficial,
ephemeral,
and transitory.
PUBLIC
OPINION
VERSUS
POPULAR
True public opinion,
temporary,
Arthur
OPINION
187
Lowell adds, in words
Hadley,
is composed
taken from his con-
of beliefs
a man is pre-
pared "to maintain
at his own cost," not simply "at another's
cost." For any of us there is a wide range of matters on which, if
pressed, we are willing
matters often extending
to vouchsafe a "yes," "no," or "maybe":
into the most recondite and specialized
realms of knowledge or experience. But the only judgments which
really count, so far as genuine belief-individual
or public-is
concerned, are those which are, in Justice Holmes's words, "out of experience and under the spur of responsibility."
These are, in the
aggregate, public opinion, and-alas,
for analytical purposes-are
not commonly worn on the sleeve, not easily given verbal expression on the spur of the moment, least of all in simple affirmatives
and negatives. "Habits of the heart," Tocqueville had called them;
and they are precisely what Burke earlier had epitomized in the
word "prejudice," with what Burke called its "latent wisdom," which
engages the mind "in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does
not leave the man hesitating in a moment of decision, skeptical,
puzzled, and unresolved."
Lowell was clearly troubled by the problem of ascertaining public opinion in advance of its expression through regular, legitimate
political processes. There are, as he notes, individual leaders in
politics with superior gifts in this respect; they are the stuff of
which the Washingtons
and Lincolns are made. But Lowell is no
more confident than either Bryce or Dicey, or Maine in his Popular
Government had been that there exists, or even can exist, any quick
and certain means of finding one's way to public-in
contrast to
ordinary popular-opinion.
Polls and surveys did not exist in Loweli's day, but I think it evident, reading him carefully
time, that he would have been at least as skeptical
at the present
of these as a
few later students, notably Lindsay Rogers in his classic The Pollsters, published in 1949, have been. I do not doubt that Lowell
would have approved of Rogers words: "So far as the pollers of
public opinion are concerned, the light they have been following
is a will-o'-the-wisp.
They have been taking in each other's washing, and have been using statistics in terms of the Frenchman's
definition: a means of being precise about matters of which you will
remain ignorant."
Lowell knew, as had Hamilton and Madison, as had Tocqueville
and Bryce, that language as often conceals as it communicates.
Hence the untrustworthiness,
or at least the precariousness,
of verbalized
responses
to verbalized
questions
concerning
matters
of
188
THE
profoundest
moral, social, and political
significance.
PUBLIC
INTEREST
We have
all
been struck by the shifting character of response to persisting issues
as revealed in polls. But without trying to consecrate public opinion, I think it fair to say that this shifting, kaleidoscopic character
is in fact one aspect of popu/ar opinion, as mercurial in nature as
the fashions, fads, and foibles which compose it. By the very virtue
of its superficiality, its topical and ad hoc character, popular opinion
lends itself to facile expression, in the polls as well as in drawing
rooms and taverns, and hence, as is the case with all fashions, to
quick and often contradictory change. Very different is public opinion: It changes, to be sure, as the history of the great moral and
political issues in America and other nations makes evident. But
change in public opinion tends to be slow, often agonizing, and-in
the deepest realms of Conviction-rare.
The greatest political leaders
in history have known this; hence their success in enterprises which,
on the basis of soundings of merely popular opinion, might have
seemed suicidal.
"Public interest populism"
It is the ease with which
popular
opinion
can be confused
with
public opinion that accounts in substantial degree for not only the
polls in American public life but also the great power of the media.
The impact, the frequently determining influence of television commentators, newspaper
editors, reporters, and columnists upon individual opinions is not to be doubted. In the scores of topics and
issues dealt with by the media daily, the shaping, or at least conditioning, effect of the media is apparent, certainly so far as popular
opinion is concerned. In this fact lies, however, a consequence that
would not, a couple of decades ago, have been anticipated by very
many makers of opinion in America:
even hatred of, the media in public
the rising disaffection with,
quarters where, though the
matter may not be given verbal articulation, it is believed that the
media are flouting, not reflecting, public opinion. There should be
for a long time an instructive lesson in the overnight conversion
of Spiro Agnew (before the fall) from nonentity to near-hero as
the result of sudden and repeated
attacks upon the media, particularly television. How do we explain the fact that a medium to
which tens of millions of people are drawn magnetically night after
night, one that manifestly has a conditioning effect upon national
thought and behavior, should face wells of potential hostility in the
public, a hostility only too easily drawn upon by the right kind of
PUBLICOPINIONVERSUSPOPULAROPINION
189
political presence? Only, I suggest, through distinction between
popular opinion and public opinion, difficult as this distinction may
be to identify in concrete cases.
There is also what Irving Kristol has admirably
described
as
"public interest populism," a phenomenon
also, I suggest, to be
accounted for in terms of popular opinion. Such populism can, as
we have learned, be utterly at odds with the sentiments of large
majorities, and yet, through the always available channels of popular opinion-newspapers
and television,
preeminently-take
on
striking force in the shaping of public policy. In only the remotest
and most tenuous fashion, if indeed at all, does the uproar about
the C.I.A., or Congress' acceptance of the H.E.W. ban on single-sex
physical education classes accord with the fundamental
values of
American public opinion. Given, however, the variety and ingenuity
of means whereby a popular opinion can be created overnight,
given credence by editorial writers, columnists, and television commentators, and acquire the position of a kind of superstructure
over
genuine public opinion, it has not proved very difficult for a point
of view to assume a degree of political strength that scarcely would
have been possible before the advent of the media in their present
enormous power.
A great deal of the recent turning of literally thousands of college students to law schools can be explained
this "'public interest populism." The Warren
precisely in terms of
Court first, then the
iudiciary as a whole, have proved to be often fertile contexts for
the achievement
of ends, some of them revolutionary
in implication, which almost certainly would not have been achieved had
they been obliged to wait for changes in American public opinion
expressed through constitutional
legislative and executive bodies.
Mandated busing for ethnic quotas will serve for a long time as the
archetype of this peculiar kind of populism. The Founding Fathers
thought, and accordingly feared, legislatures in this light. We have
learned, though, that the executive and the iudiciary can only too
easily become settings of actions which run against the grain of
public opinion.
Walter Lippmann and "The Public Philosophy"
It is useful to conclude this essay by reference to a work that deserved better than its fate in the hands of most of its reviewers when
it was published
author's interest
in 1955: Lippmann's The Public Philosophy. The
in the subiect of public opinion was doubtless
190
THE
generated while a student in Lowell's Harvard.
Opinion, which came out in 1922, has many
PUBLIC
INTEREST
His epochal Public
points of similarity
with Lowell's own views and also those of Bryce. To this day, Lippmann's Public Opinion remains the best known and most widely read
single book on the subject. Whatever may be its roots in earlier
thinking, it possesses a striking originality and cogency. Even with
all that has mushroomed since the 1930's in the field of the study
of public opinion, Lippmann's work of half a century ago continues
to offer a valuable insight into the nature and sources of public
opinion in the democracies.
Even so, I prefer to deal here with Lippmann's later work, The
Public Philosophy, for it is here, to a degree not present in the
more analytical and discursive Public Opinion, that we find this
eminent journalist-philosopher
reviving and giving pertinence to the
tradition that began with The Federalist, and that has such exemplary statements in the other works I have mentioned. I would not
argue that the book is without flaw, chiefly in the difficult enterprise
of trying to describe precisely and concretely the public and its genuine manifestations.
But such flaws apart, it is a profound and also
courageous restatement of a point of view regarding representative
government that began with such minds as Burke and Madison.
"The people," Lippmann writes in words reminiscent of the apprehensions of The Federalist, "have acquired power which the)_
are incapable of exercising, and the governments
they elect have
lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern." What,
we ask, are the legitimate boundaries of the people's power? Again
it could be Hamilton or Madison rather than Lippmann responding:
"The answer cannot be simple. But for a rough beginning let us say
that the people are able to give, and to withhold, their consent to
being governed-their
consent to what the government asks of them,
proposes to them, and has done in the conduct of their affairs. They
can elect the government. They can remove it. They can approve
or disapprove of its performance. But they cannot administer the
government. They cannot themselves perform."
Lippmann draws a distinction respecting the public, or people,
that has been present in Western thought since the very beginning
of the tradition I have been concerned with. It is the distinction
between the people as mere multitude
toral particles, and, to use Lippmann's
or mass, a sandheap of elecphrasing, "The People as a
historic community":
It is often assumed, but without warrant, that the opinions of The
People as voters can be treated as the expression of The People as
PUBLICOPIINIO1N
VERSUSPOPULAROPINION
191
a historic community. The crucial problem of modern democracy arises
from the fact that this assumption is false. The voters cannot be relied
upon to represent The People ....
Because of the diserepaney between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation,
the voters have no title to consider themselves as the proprietors of
the commonwealth and to claim that their interests are identical with
the public interest. A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The
People.
It is easy enough to earieature
that statement
and to draw from
it a variety of uses, some without doubt immoral and despotie in
eharaeter. In polities as in religion and elsewhere, many a leader
has at times justified arbitrary and harsh rule by recourse to something along the line of what Lippmann calls "The People," the people, that is, as a historie, tradition-anchored,
and "corporate" nation
rather than as the whole or a majority of actual, living voters. None
of this is to be doubted. And yet, however diffieult to phrase, however ambiguous in concrete circumstance, the distinction may beit is, I would argue-a vital one if, on the one hand, liberty is to be
made secure and, on the other hand, the just authority of government is to be made equally secure.
In truth, Lippmann's distinction is but a restatement of the core
of an intellectual
mous description
tradition going back at very least to Burke's faof political soeiety as a contract between the dead,
the living, and the unborn. That deseription too was capable, as
Tom Paine made evident, of being pilloried and moeked, of being
declared a mere verbal mask for opposition to all change or a rationalization of government policy flouting the interests of the governed. And yet it is, as is Lippmann's, a valid, even vital, distinction,
one that lies at the heart of a philosophy-so
often termed "conservative," though it is in fact liberal-which
in the 20th century,
under whatever name, we have discovered to be the only real alternative to the kinds of awful power which are contained in "people's
governments"
or are, in our own country, hinted at in declared
programs of "common cause" populism. The distinction which Burke
and Lippmann make between the two conceptions of "the people"
is fundamental in a line of 19th and 20th eentury thought that ineludes Coleridge, Southey, John Stuart Mill, Maine, Toequeville,
Burekhardt, Weber, and, in our own day, Hannah Arendt, Bertrand
de Jouvenel, and Jacques Ellul. Basically, it is a distinetion between constituted society and the kind of aggregate that, history
tells us, threatens to break through the interstices of the social
bond in all times of crisis, the aggregate we call the mass or erowd,
always oscillating between
anarehie
and military forms of despotism.
192
THE PUBLIC
INTEREST
Paralleling this distinction between the two conceptions of the
people is the distinction, as I have tried to show here, between public opinion and what I have called popular opinion. The one distinction is as pertinent to present reality as the other. We live,
plainly, in a kind of twilight age of government, one in which the
loss of confidence in political institutions is matched by the erosion
of traditional authority in kinship, locality, culture, language, school,
and other elements of the social fabric. The kind of mass populism,
tinctured by an incessant search for the redeeming political personage, where militarism and humanitarianism
become but two faces
of the same coin, and where the quest for centralized power is unremitting, is very much with us. More and more it becomes difficult
to determine what is genuinely public opinion, the opinion of the
people organized into a constitutional political community, and what
is only popular opinion, the kind that is so easily exploited by selfappointed tribunes of the people, by populist demagogues, and by
all-too-many agencies of the media. The recovery of true public opinion in our age will not be easy, but along with the recovery of social
and cultural authority and of the proper authority of political government in the cities and the nation, it is without question among
the sovereign
necessities
of the rest of this centu_.